Huawei Vision : Magic of 3D with Android at Rs. 18,499 Only [Review]

Recently launched Huawei Vision, a mid-ranged Android Smartphone (with a price tag or Rs. 18,499) came by our office few days ago. Here is a brief review about this affordable Android Smartphone. (For Un-boxing & Hands-on Video scroll to the end of post)

Design:

The phone features a well-crafted sleek unibody aluminum chases very similar to some of the HTC phones. Its shiny, attractive and measures just 9.9mm ultra-thin. With this dimension, it might feel a little heavier at 121 grams, but for most the weight might be very usual.

3.7 inch curved screen with WVGA resolution is something awesome, It gives you a enhanced 3D experience following the line of your thumb as you swipe between home screens. Outdoor visibility is a little poor but off-axis viewing angles and indoor experience is satisfactory.

Like majority of Android phones, under the screen there are four capacitive buttons for Menu, Home, Back and Search. Above the screen, there is a video call camera, proximity sensor and an ambient light sensor. There are no keys on the right side, but the left side features a single piece volume rocker. There is a 3.5 mm headphone jack and power button on the top whereas microUSB / charging port is located at the bottom along with microphone.

On the backside there is 5 MP Auto-focus camera with a single LED flash light and speakers. There is no removable battery option and only a bottom cover to insert SIM card and memory card.

User Interface:

Huawei Vision comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread with pre-loaded SPB Shell 3D launcher, so you get a very attractive interface with lots of customizable animated home screens and widgets. The Carousel preview of home screens together with the curved screen provides a true 3D experience. The application drawer also features some 3D scrolling effect, if you placed shortcuts of some apps on the home screen a little home icon will be displayed on the upper right corner of the main icon.

The SPB Shell 3D gives this smartphone a 3D like look for sure, but beneath it there is all stock android, even the notifications bar has no toggle icons for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth & Auto rotate etc. The lockscreen itself tells you the story with a classic swipe to right unlock.

Interestingly the SPB Shell 3D works very smooth on this device but if you don’t like it then you always have the option of Stock Launcher or you can download a new one of your liking. The phone isn’t upgradeable to Android 4.0 officially, but you can try custom ROMs at your own risk.

Calls & Messaging:

The phone features stock Dialer, Phonebook and Keyboard. There is no SNS Integration or smart dialing. The keyboard comes with an app called TouchPal, featuring early word prediction. If you are a heavy texter then you aren’t going to like it but as always you have lots of other keyboards available out there.

Vision’s call quality is good for both ends, the speaker sound is also loud and pleasant, and you can easily hear the other party with no trouble. Video calling using Skype is okay too, though the front camera results are poor as its just a VGA camera, but you can switch to the back camera for better results.

Camera and Music:

Huawei Vision features a 5MP auto-focus camera with a single LED flash light. The camera interface is purely stock. It takes a little bit more time to capture an image, but the overall result of images is satisfactory. The stock interface doesn’t offer much customization so you have a very limited number of options like picture size, mode and flash light settings.

Have a look at the sample images:

Vision is enabled to record 720p videos at 30 fps but the quality isn’t satisfying. It produces 3GP format files which aren’t as good as MP4. There is no zoom in the Camcorder and the overall interface is stock Gingerbread just the like Camera. You can record videos using LED flash light or it may be used at the hours of electricity load-shedding.

Huawei Vision speakers aren’t very loud and they just sound flat, but it might work for general users. The music/video player loaded on Huawei Vision is default with no customization.

Performance:

Huawei Vision is equipped with a single core, 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and 512MB of RAM and Adreno 205 graphics processor. The phone runs very smooth and we haven’t seen any noticeable lags except some while playing heavy 3D games.

The SPB Shell 3D works also smooth and doesn’t eat many resources. So the overall performance of the phone is very good. Though it can’t compete the latest Quad-core phones but keeping the price in mind this phone is surely one of the best options.

Battery:

The phone packs a 1400mAh battery, which lasts 2 days for an average user, but for users who love to browse over Wi-Fi, play games and multimedia, it shrinks to a single day or less but it’s quite normal.

Price & Availability:

The phone is available in all major cities of Pakistan, for a price of Rupees 18,499, giving a tough competition to Samsung Galaxy Gio, Ace Duos and HTC Desire C.

Huawei Vision is for sure a good option at this price tag, but because it’s a new “Chinese” brand it’s not getting proper attention. Huawei needs to work on some attractive advertisement campaign, they also need to make sure that all their phones support Urdu language because Unicode Urdu is gaining popularity in Pakistan these days, people love to browse Urdu websites and send text in their National language.

The specs of this smartphone are great and the build quality is nice, so why not give it a try? what do you say about this?

Text messaging is very popular. Unfortunately, very few brands have support for Urdu, making it impossible for new users. When you review a phone of any time, you should mention whether it has support for Urdu. Secondly, you should urge PTA to require all imported brands to have support for Urdu. FBR can issue necessary instructions to customs authorities. Even phone companies should demand it, as it will mean many more text messages.

Sorry Hameed just forgot about it while writing otherwise I had that in mind. Anyway this phone doesn’t support Urdu, I have talked about this with concerned people at Huawei. Let’s hope they release an update very soon.